


Favours

by sparxwrites



Series: peace beneath the city [1]
Category: The Yogscast
Genre: Alternate Universe - Urban Fantasy, Fae & Fairies, Hurt/Comfort, It's a miracle that boy hasn't been eaten already tbh, M/M, Urban Magic Yogs, Will makes very poor life choices
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-14
Updated: 2014-11-14
Packaged: 2018-02-25 09:36:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,109
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2617100
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sparxwrites/pseuds/sparxwrites
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kirin looks up sharply at the noise that rattles through his shop, frowning. The creases around his eyes soften into a smile, though, when he realises who it is. “Hello, Will,” he says, standing up from behind the counter and crossing the distance between them in several long steps – just in time to catch Will under the arm when one of his knees buckles, nearly sending him crashing to the ground. “How nice to see you again. You seem to be making a habit of this.”</p><p>(In which Will stumbles into Kirin's shop, <i>again</i>, with a little bit of a problem. Kirin is more than happy to help - in exchange for a favour, of course.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Favours

**Author's Note:**

> rocks up to the urban magic au five minutes late with starbucks, kirinwill, and ridiculous matthew swift references. this got... a little bit wildly out of hand, tbh.
> 
> (also dear god someone please stop will. i am so concerned for him. bb do you not know how to recognise the fae do you not realise what you're dealing with i'm so distressed.)

Will’s not sure how long he’s been walking, but he knows it’s too long, cold deep in his bones and feet a raw ache in his boots. The city’s caught him again, swept him away and pulled him off course from his quick trip down the road to pick up groceries and shampoo, and he has no idea where he is.

That’s not strictly true; he knows where he is, as he always does in the city, an instinctual sort of feel for the pavements his feet are tracing. But his head’s somewhere so far away that he can’t feel anything. It’s a little sickening, the separation of it, disorientation and confusion making his attempt to claw his way back to his wandering body even more hopeless than it already is.

For a long minute, he considers giving up, sacrificing himself to the city and waiting for his body to get hit by some passing car. The city is viscous mud he can’t pull himself out of, a sucking, clawing mass stringing weights around his waist to make him sink, and he’s not strong enough to drag himself out of it. Not even close.

Then he passes by _somewhere_.

It that smells of earth and tastes of sweetness and lemon and sounds like the whispers of tall grass in the wind, with enchantments stitched into its very foundations – and, just for a second, the hold is weakened. He grabs sideways with all the desperation of a dying man, praying for something to latch onto.

The door’s an odd combination of rough and smooth under his fingers, the glossy paint of it cracked a little and peeling off in places to reveal the bare wood underneath. He clutches at it desperately, though, shoves at it in the hope it will offer sanctuary. It feels like peace, like home; not his home but _someone’s_ at least.

That’s the important thing - the boundary. The separation of city and other.

Boundaries are good for all sorts of things, but right now he needs one to unhook the city’s claws from him. To detach his eyes from the security cameras and his nose from the rats and his feet from the swirling eddies of rhythm and history that are dragging him along. The city’s pulling him down, down, and he can still remember his name but he can’t remember much else.

It _terrifies_ him. He doesn’t want to be one of those people who lose themself in the city, that end up blank-eyed and hollow-cheeked and forever wandering the streets. Or locked up in a care home somewhere, if anyone they know finds them.

He nearly cries when the door gives way to let him stagger inside. A bell tinkles somewhere from in the depths of wherever he’s ended up, and he grabs at the doorframe to stop himself from keeling over – as he’s done an unfortunate number of times before in situations like this – as the street reluctantly lets go of him piece by disparate piece.

Kirin looks up sharply at the noise that rattles through his shop, frowning. The creases around his eyes soften into a smile, though, when he realises who it is.

“Hello, Will,” he says, standing up from behind the counter and crossing the distance between them in several long steps – just in time to catch Will under the arm when one of his knees buckles, nearly sending him crashing to the ground. “How nice to see you again. You seem to be making a habit of this.”

“I-” Will blinks owlishly, looks around in a faintly disoriented manner and then groans when he realises where he is. “This isn’t intentional,” he says, scrubbing the hand not clutching at the doorframe like a lifeline across his face. It’s shaking, and he can’t seem to make it stop. “I didn’t _mean_ to end up here, I just…” He shrugs a little helplessly, fights to get his feet back underneath him and barely manages it.

“The city carried you here?” finishes Kirin for him, nodding with sympathy. He wraps his arm around Will’s shoulders, helps him over to an old wooden chair next to the counter that Will swears wasn’t there last time he ‘visited’, and settles him down in it. “Understandable. Completely understandable. I don’t mind.” With Will no longer in danger of collapsing, he moves back over to the door and closes it against the bustle of the street.

With a barrier against the outside world – the sealing of the shop perimeter making charms and wards flare and letting the older, deeper magic of _home_ and _sanctuary_ settle over the place – the roar of the city falls back a little.

Some of the colour begins to return to Will’s face, shoulders slumping in relief as if a great weight’s been lifted from them. But his eyes are still bloodshot and there’s still a faint twitch in his jaw, slight tremors in his hands with fingers still grey-purple from the cold. There’s no aura of sickness around him that Kirin can find, but he looks far from well.

Kirin frowns, pats the door absent-mindedly, and heads over to one corner of the room. Settling the battered kettle down on a small gas burner that appears to be there specifically for this purpose, he turns it on with a careless flick of his wrist, before looking over at Will. “Tea?”

The small flash of magic makes Will blink, and he peers curiously at Kirin. He’d been in no fit state last time to notice anything other than a faint air of magic in the place, settled over everything like a thin layer of dust.

Now he’s in better control of himself, he can feel it properly, a sense of weight and warmth and force twisted around Kirin’s shoulders like a cape. “Please,” he says, probing at the sensation tentatively, curious. It’s like nothing he’s ever felt before, not even from druids or pagan magicians and their heavily earthed magic.

“That’s rather rude,” says Kirin, absently, a hint of ice in his voice. He brushes off Will’s clumsy magical fingers with a flick of a thought, sending them back across the room to their owner. Not that Will would be able to find anything important. Kirin’s true nature is concealed under the layers of charms and concealments and glamours he’s wound around himself over the years and decades to keep what he truly is hidden from all but the most persistent.

“I-” stutters Will, unused to people picking up on his little investigations. He’s not the most subtle, he knows – but living with absent-minded Xephos and Honeydew, and interacting primarily with people lacking much magical talent, has made him lazy. “I didn’t-”  
“-Have anyone to teach you manners when you were younger?” asks Kirin, but there’s a hint of amusement in his voice. “I suppose you’re not used to people noticing that.”

Will nods slightly, and takes the tea Kirin offers him with a slightly ashamed grimace. “It’s a bad habit,” he says, although it’s more than that – it’s curiosity, a need to explore, to grab out at anything in his reach and _know_ it.

He reads people for the same reason he skims through laptop files and hooks himself up to routers and falls into the telephone lines; because he _can_.

“I’d appreciate it if you didn’t indulge it around me, if you’re planning on making falling through my door a regular occurrence,” says Kirin, leaning against the counter with his own cup of tea and inhaling the steam curling off of it. “Although you’re welcome to ask questions.”

Dragging a hand across his face, Will takes a sip of the tea, and blinks in surprise. It’s something herbal, sweet and a little lemony; warm enough to put some heat back into a body stripped of it from wandering the streets for hours on end, but cool enough not to burn his tongue. “I- no, I don’t plan on making a habit of it,” he says, ducking his head to hide the faint embarrassment scrawled across his cheeks in pale pink. “I’m sorry for disturbing you.”

“Lots of lost things get swept into this shop,” says Kirin with an easy shrug, curling his hands around the cup in his grip and dwarfing it in his palms. “I’m used to it.” The smile he smiles is not entirely friendly – not entirely human – and Will, focused on his tea, misses the warning in it completely.

Will wants to protest his designation as a _lost thing_. But considering he’d started on the other side of the city and hadn’t intended to go anywhere near this particular area of it, had just gotten his feet caught up in the city’s heartbeat and his eyes lost in the rats and the pigeons, he doesn’t feel like he has much ground to.

Instead, he takes another sip of the tea, relishes the sweetness of it and stares down at the golden-brown of it in his cup, clear and swirling. Others would be able to scry something in the eddies of it, no doubt, but his talents have never lain in divination or fortune-telling. “There’s a big game on tonight,” he explains, a little heavily, scrubbing at one temple and wincing at the thought of how bad his evening’s going to be if he’s already feeling like this now. “Everything’s… amplified.”

A city of excited people all talking about one thing is powerful magic, bigger than anything a single person could hope to control. It’s a spell bound together by text messages and hashtags and word of mouth; retweets and reblogs and shares an unintentional ritual, a prayer spoken by thousands of mouths and thumbs.

It’s enough to drive anyone with half a sense tapped into the city mad.

“Hmm.” Kirin eyes him thoughtfully, the bags under his eyes and the slump of his shoulders and the way his posture makes it look like every joint aches. “I… might be able to help you. If you trust me, that is.” He sets his un-drunk cup of tea down on the counter, smiles a wide, friendly smile, and beckons.

Unsure what else to do, Will follows – lets Kirin lead him out the back of the shop to the glass-roofed room where he keeps his plants. It’s quieter still back here, despite the glass roof, the slow magic of new and growing life enough to dampen even the most insistent city magic. For a long second, he just stands there, breathing in the rich smell of earth and greenery.

There’s something faintly lemony in the air, faintly sweet, reminiscent of the tea. He wonders whether Kirin makes it himself. Before he can ask, though, Kirin grabs an well-worn blanket from a shelf tucked behind a handful of seedlings. Will can’t quite keep the surprise from showing on his face.

“What’re you doing?” he asks, frowning as Kirin spreads the blanket out on the floor. The patterns on it are odd, a twisting mishmash of shapes and symbols that are so jumbled together he can’t work out if they’re supposed to be spell or not.  
“We’re going to try and ground you a little,” says Kirin, raising an eyebrow and nodding at the bright, patchwork fabric covering the rough wooden planks of the floor. “Sit down.”

Will perches on the blanket a little warily, settles himself against the padded fabric of it and tries not to feel like the plants are watching him. He jumps, though, when Kirin sits down behind him, presses hands to his shoulder blades. “Hey! What’re you-”

He’s silenced as Kirin’s magic settles across and down his spine at the contact, a blanket of warm static that he has to resist the urge to lean back into. It smells like spring and ozone and storm clouds, tastes a little like the honey and lemon of the tea he just drank, and feels like the strength of an oak in the wind and the shift of tectonic plates to form a mountain.

There’s something patient and ancient and _solid_ about it that scares Will, just a little.

“You’re being nosy again,” says Kirin, sounding amused, and Will snorts.  
“Your magic is crawling across my skin and _I’m_ being nosy?” he asks – a little sharply, maybe, for someone who’s getting a favour from a near-stranger. But Kirin just smiles, inclines his head a little in agreement.

The static across his back warms just a little more, cars left out in the sun and cats on the windowsill and laptops with their cooling fans broken, and Will trembles with it. Trembles with the way that just sitting still and quiet seems to invite the city into his head, an unwelcome visitor with claws against the inside of his skull.

 “Easy,” says Kirin, presses his fingers ever so slightly into the tense stiffness of Will’s back. “Easy.” The words are a low rumble, soft and oddly soothing. “I won’t get you lost.”

Will nods, but the movement’s sharp, jerky – the city is a roar of noise-colour-insistence against his senses even through the protective walls of Kirin’s shop, rotting litter and the sweetness of too-ripe fruits on market stalls and the grip of tyres against warm tarmac. It grates against his skin, spreads out around him like a sea waiting to clutch him tight and drag him down to drown.

The tension doesn’t leave his shoulders, and Kirin sighs. “You’ve not been taught anything, have you?” he murmurs sadly, and Will wants to argue with the slight against his uncle, but it’s true. He came here to learn computer magic, technomancy, and instead he’s been driven close to madness with the unrelenting, inexorable rhythms of the city. “Okay then. We’ll start from the beginning. Reach up.”

“I-” says Will, cuts off as Kirin shushes him.  
“Don’t ask me what I mean, and tell me you don’t know how to,” he says, and although his words are kind there’s a bite of iron to them. “This is what you _are_. You know what I mean. You know how.”

Drawing in a deep breath through his nose, Will closes his eyes. It feels strange to reach out beyond his body, when he usually fights so hard to keep himself contained within it, but oddly natural, too. Almost like Kirin’s right – like this _is_ what he is – except that’s ridiculous. He’s a technomancer, not a sorcerer, not some kind of urban magician. Someone would have noticed, if he was. Would have told him.

Wouldn’t they?

The question flees his mind as city reaches arms up to greet him, huge and concrete-grey and claw-tipped. He exhales and, grounded by the deep-warm-electric of Kirin’s magic, Will lets himself tumble forward into it.

It’s both freefall, and not. The city’s there to catch him, he knows, but it _doesn’t_ – lets him tumble downwards and downwards until at last he grabs out at a passing pigeon with a gasp. As he clutches tight to its tail feathers, it spirals up on a drift of warm air snatched from an air conditioning, wings spread wide and lazy in the weak afternoon sun.

 He prefers CCTV for eyes, usually; laptop webcams or iPhones or digital cameras, anything with electricity and a lens. But, despite the abundance of them in the city, they’re no good right now. None of them will get him high enough.

The pigeon does, though, bears the sorcerer riding it with good humour and lets him coax it higher and higher into the air on the thermal. Once he’s high enough – above the faint layer of smog and dirt and exhaust fumes that carpets the city like a layer of plaque, but not quite high enough to touch the off-white cold of the clouds – he stops, lets the pigeon circle on outstretched wings and perch on the window ledge of a nearby tower block with a fussy settling motion.

“What do you see?” breathes Kirin quietly, a gentle prompting that somehow filters through the haze of magic and space that’s settled through Will’s mind.

When Will’s eyes snap open, they’re oil-slick shiny, glittering with the shards of shattered bottles and beady like those of the fox skulking among the bins behind Kirin’s shop. He exhales traffic fumes, tastes the water of week-old puddles in his mouth instead of saliva, feels the thrum of an engine in his chest instead of his heartbeat – and when he speaks, it’s with the voices of the thousands of people shuffling through the city to the beat of inaudible music.

“Pigeons,” he says, eyes unfocused and words spilling from his mouth without conscious thought. His mind’s lost in the sky, spread through the diffuse haze of smog that hangs around the skyscrapers. “They carry you- catch the feathers and up you go, wings in the clouds, buildings in the smoke-” He cuts off with a shaky exhale, licks his lips against the taste of brackish water.

Kirin smiles, almost indulgently. “Good,” he says, spreads his fingers wider against Will’s shoulder blades and feels them flex ever so slightly in response. “Anything else…?”

“Waves. Data.” It flickers in front of his eyes, streams of numbers and letters in miniature fluorescence that scroll across his pupils. Secrets and pictures and knowledge, laid bare for him to see if he chooses to dip his fingers in and decode the binary of its language. “The electricity in the wires, signals in the sky, so many _waves_. Telephone wires-” He tumbles into them with ease, blinks, laughs – a childish sound of delight. For a moment, his eyes flash electric blue. “ _Come be we, and be-!_ ”

“No,” says Kirin, reaches out to tug Will back with thumbs against the line of his spine and the determination of tectonic plates. “Not there. They are not for you.” Under his breath, he adds, “Not yet, at least.”

Will grumbles in protest, the rattle of an exhaust pipe and the whine of a dying neon light, and Kirin pets his back with the slow, sweeping stroke of a thumb by way of consolation. “It’s okay,” he says, as Will’s eyes lose their electric edge and he disentangles himself from the telephone wires. “Reach down. Tell me what you find there.”

“Further down,” encourages Kirin, when he feels the spread of Will’s magic stall at ground level. “I want to know what’s underground.” He knows what’s underground, of course – all the things that are under every city, plus a few things that aren’t, are unique to _his –_ but he wants to hear Will say it.

Swallowing, Will lets himself drop even further, blinks against the darkness of it and the weight of the earth and the way everything dulls and deadens around him. It feels a little like the day after snow, everything still and strangely quiet, other than- “Trains,” he says, the roaring rattle of one passing beneath him a shock enough to nearly make him jump after the peace. “A heartbeat.”

They’re not quite regular, but regular enough; a thrum of energy and grinding wheels that spreads throughout the entire city in a metallic imitation of human blood vessels.  “Power here, too, _come be-_ ” The electric sings to him again, louder and sweeter than before, dancing angels in the wires.

This time, he pulls himself out of the fibre-optic cabling before Kirin can chase him away again.

There are drains at street level, and they drop past the cabling, spread out around it and the complex criss-cross of train tunnels to form a sewage system. He doesn’t linger there, amongst the bugs and the rats and the other lost creatures – there’s no crackling power there, just life and decay, little of interest to a technomancer trying to lose himself in a city.

Sinking even deeper, he finds _something_ , lines of power and even more tunnels and things wrapped in flaming nexuses of charms and enchantments that refuse to budge under his coaxing. It irks him.

“There are places I can’t go, here,” says Will, something like uncertainty in his voice. Never before has any part of the city failed to unfold at his command, refused to bare its secrets under his touch. It’s distressing, like discovering one of his own limbs has been removed. “Some of the tunnels- they burn- and a well…”

He can feel _it_ in there, something, a curled presence that roils with old malevolence and dark magic. It lashes out when it feels him there, a whipcrack of tamed shadows that scalds when it brushes him, and he recoils with a cry.

Kirin frowns, lips twitching downwards with realisation. “Lying,” he murmurs, irritation threaded through the single syllable. “Don’t worry about that, for now. Leave it be.” He slides one hand up enough to brush fingers at the nape of Will’s neck, feels him calm a little beneath the touch. “Now. Go _outwards_.”

There’s a second’s pause, a hesitation where Will’s breath hitches a little in his chest. He’s still him, still himself for now at least, but he knows the city. Knows the size of it, the weight of it, the way it drags you down like undertow and swallows you whole. The prospect of opening himself up to that, volunteering his mind to be taken and consumed, terrifies him. Taking a deep breath, he tries to center himself, tries to brace himself for the coming fall-

and collapses.

He slumps back against Kirin’s chest, a puppet with his strings cut, eyes still open and unfocused and empty-beer-bottle-glassy. In an instant, Kirin’s magic surges in alarm, a physical crackle in the air – and then Will laughs, with the screech of brakes and the giggle of a baby and the start-up noise of a laptop.

“Hello again,” he says, speaks directly to the city in a dreamy sort of voice as it unfolds himself around him like a spreading cloak. For a moment he feels like a king, a god; so much power and life and _knowledge_ spread out below one outstretched hand, his for the taking, ready to be stripped down to the bone.

The feeling leaves as quickly as it had come, though, a flash of thought before the city pulls him further in and the idea becomes abhorrent. He could no more tear the power from this place than he could tear his own flesh from his bones, swallows down bile at the very idea of the agony of it.

“Height,” he says, abruptly – because Kirin may not have said anything but Will feels like he should speak nonetheless. “No room to move- not outwards- we went up, climbed into the sky, _laughed_.” He sucks in a breath, and another, a skyscraper swaying ever so slightly in the wind. “So much _history_ , though, the graveyards we were built on – they have no idea.” He feels them all, the ghosts of past buildings and roads that spring up in shadowy, unreal echoes, whispering to him above the city’s roar. “We’re so old, _so old_ , and we- we _love_ us.”

There’s no other word for it, the way the city wraps itself around every single person that wears footsteps into its pavement, every single car that carves tyre-tracks onto its roads. The way the people wrap themselves around the city in return, their own private rhythms and rituals and quiet places that they carve out in their days for so many different parts of it.

He’s overwhelmed with it, the weight and depth and pressure of it, the way the people and the city are tangled up until he can’t tell where one ends and the other begins.

Can’t tell where _he_ ends and the city begins.

Kirin smiles, and leaves it one heartbeat, two, three, before he feels Will start to sink too deep. “Close your eyes again,” he says, hands still against Will’s back and lips half-pressed against his hair with the way Will’s head is tucked under his chin.

Will does so obediently, a flash of glass-electricity-oil for one last time before it vanishes under lashes and lids. “Inhale.” His ribs expand like the swell of the river, steel bones like scaffolding as they stretch outwards, the dirty clouds blooming from power station filling his lungs. “Let go.”

He doesn’t want to. The city calls to him, a siren-song of rhythm and pattern, order in chaos and chaos in order that he could drown in. Part of him wants to sink down into it, fall forever until he forgets his name and face and self and can feast on the _life_ of it all. He could drown himself in the scale and knowledge of it, the unlearnable enormity of information.

It would be so easy to just reach out and let go and become a shadow on the wall, an angel in the wire-

But there’s magic at his back, ancient and sweet-lemon warm and _very_ determined to drag him down to where his body still lies, waiting for him. He half-fights it, bats at it weakly before the part of him that is still _himself_ enough to know he needs to leave latches onto it. The city has claws, digs them in and tries to keep him – but he uses the old magic to find his way back, piece by disparate piece.

Then he opens his eyes, gasps in a breath of clean air full of plants and soil and quietly humming magic, and chokes as the smog leaves his lungs in a black cloud.

His eyes are his own again, heart back to beating in his chest, his blood only blood and his saliva only saliva and his mind only his own. He is himself again, a singular rather than a plural, one tiny mortal contained in a cage of flesh and blood.

Part of him wants to cry with the unfairness of it.

“Okay?” asks Kirin, kindly, letting his hands slip down Will’s back, parallel to his spine, and then fall away.  
“Yeah- yes,” says Will. His voice is normal, perhaps a little quieter than it should be – but he feels like it should be hoarse, ruined, as if he were screaming. Something, _anything_ , to show the enormity of what he’s just lost.

Despite the change and the grieving and the shock of having two eyes, two hands, of being crammed back inside his own mind again, he feels… different. He doesn’t quite dare say better, not yet, but he thinks he might be. The city’s settled inside him, somehow, no longer a raw scrape over his skin but a steady throb through his veins and deep inside his bones.

It’s almost like a second heartbeat, the rhythm and weight of it oddly comforting.

Kirin smiles, nods, runs a hand over Will’s shoulder. Will tries not to twitch at the contact. “Good,” Kirin says, standing up and stretching with his arms over his head and his spine arching back. He sighs as the stiffness in his shoulders and hips from sitting still flows out of him with the movement, before holding out a hand to Will. “That’s good.”

Taking the proffered hand, Will lets himself be pulled to his feet, and is quietly grateful when Kirin pretends not to notice when he stumbles slightly. His legs are too long and wide, don’t have enough claws for him to balance with.

He lets himself be led back into the shop – a little dizzy, faintly confused, but headache-free for the first time in weeks. The lack of a throbbing ache just behind his eyes is nearly enough to make him cry with relief, but he doesn’t, just lets Kirin help him back into the chair again with a grateful sigh.

“Thank you,” he murmurs, settling into the chair again for lack of anything better to do, legs still not quite used to being human again. “I- honestly don’t know how to pay you back. I don’t have anything to pay you back _with_.” He grimaces, pats at his pockets, and sighs when he realises he doesn’t even have the money to buy something from the shop.

He doesn’t like leaving debts unpaid. Not only is it bad manners, it’s generally a bad idea where magic is involved.

Kirin brushes off the thanks with a smile and a modest sort of shrug, filling the kettle with water again in preparation for more tea. “I’m sure we can figure something out,” he says, easily. “I don’t need payment, I’m just glad to help. Let’s just call it a favour and be done, shall we?”

“A favour?” says Will, tone suddenly sharp. He’s aware Kirin’s something not-quite-human, maybe something _more_ than human. His magic is too old and patient and strong for him to be anything else.  Every little child knows non-humans that deal in favours are not good creatures to get tangled up with – Kirin _seems_ benevolent, for now, but appearances are misleading and can change in a heartbeat.

Waving a dismissive hand in Will’s direction, Kirin puts the kettle down on the burner again, a slightly different combination of leaves and herbs and magic mixed with the water this time. The smell of sweetness and lemons fills the room, and he smiles at the way Will unconsciously relaxes with it.

“Oh, I thought maybe you could come and help me with the plants some time,” Kirin says, watching the technomancer closely, the not-quite-lie of misdirection coming easily to a tongue well-practiced in it. “Or my laptop – I’m afraid I haven’t really the knack for technomancy.” He sighs, and pats the chunk of plastic and circuitry where it’s perched precariously on the edge of his desk.

Will thinks of Kirin’s magic, slow and immovable and with all the give of an ancient oak, and can’t imagine him having the speed and flexibility of thought needed for technomancy. There’s something ancient about Kirin, and ancient things dislike movement, resist change – and a good thing too, because there’s power in age, enormous power that becomes dangerous with speed.

“Oh,” he says, shrugging a little, rubbing his palms against his thighs in a distracted sort of way. His mouth tastes like honeyed lemon, mind still a little hazy from the city, and he’s sure a favour to Kirin can’t be _that_ bad. He’s been so nice, after all. “Okay. I’d be happy to help.”

It’s only fair, he supposes, exchanging a favour for a favour. Work has to be paid for, one way or another. He smiles a little, takes the new cup of tea Kirin offers him and sips at it slowly. “I owe you a favour, then.”

He fails entirely to notice the sharp-toothed smile that spreads across Kirin’s lips at his delightfully naïve answer.


End file.
